Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture: A Cross-Disciplinary Comparison (History of Science and Medicine Library, 11)

The design, construction and verification of complex two- and three-dimensional shapes in architecture and ship geometry have always been a particularly demanding part of the art of engineering. Before science-based structural design and analysis were applied in the construction industries, i.e., before 1800, the task of conceiving, documenting and fabricating such shapes constituted the most significant interface between practitioner's knowledge and learned knowledge, above all in geometry. The history of shape development in these two disciplines therefore promises especially valuable insights into the knowledge history of shape creation.
This volume is a collection of contributions by outstanding scholars in their fields of study, archaeology, history of architecture and ship design, in classic antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The volume presents a comparative knowledge history in these two distinct branches of construction engineering.

Horst Nowacki, Dr.-Ing. (1963) in Naval Architecture, Technical University of Berlin, Prof. of Ship Design at TU Berlin (1974-1998), has published about 200 articles and books on naval architecture and ship theory including Computational Geometry for Ships, co-authored with M.I.G. Bloor and B. Oleksiewicz (World Scientific Publ., Singapore, 1995).

Wolfgang Lefèvre, Ph.D. (1972) in Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Professor for Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and Senior Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, until 2006. He has published extensively on history of philosophy, science, and technology including Picturing Machines (MIT Press, 2004).